Parking Lot Pandemic 20 (2020/2021)
The most severe medical advice was to seek permanent sanctuary indoors.
A designated family member could leave to fetch the necessities beyond the home. For those who volunteered to sacrifice themselves for the sake of groceries, booze, cigarettes and diapers, many rules were put in place for entering public places.
Safe sanctuary was extremely appealing -- if you were one of the lucky people who loved staying indoors night and day month after month.
Jeanne Randolph
from Parking Lot Pandemic
27 photographs
Created in 2020
Printed in 2021
Inkjet on Epson Premium Luster paper
Edition of 2
11 x 8 ¼ inches
“The Exchange District in Winnipeg, where all the grand warehouses, factories and national banks were established in the early 1900s, is also a district of parking lots. Ordinarily some lots would be more popular than others, but when public life closed down during the pandemic, every parking lot in The Exchange District was empty. The bistros and cocktail lounges that were more home than my home was, were empty. Their interiors were darkened by massive curtains pulled across massive windows. And next door or half a block over, there would be a parking lot with not a single car. Parking lots were unexpectedly on display. Without cars they looked raw, as if the hide of the city had been stripped off. I remember walking across King Street to look closely at a lot, and when I beheld the huge jagged potholes, gouged out gravel, crumbling, split uneven ground I laughed out loud. There’s a pandemic.
But there never had been time or energy to flatten and smooth these wilderness surfaces, especially ones that will be hidden under car bodies when everything is normal again. Standing on the King Street sidewalk, the phrase “car bodies” mingled in my mind with “human bodies.” At that moment my imagination filled the empty parking lots with the poetry of the pandemic. Every possible emotion the pandemic heightened, every version of death, of near misses and of escape that poetry provides.” — Jeanne Randolph
